Coleridge and the daemonic imagination
By: Gregory Leadbetter
Series: Nineteenth-century major lives and letters
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: 2011
Place of publication: New York, N.Y
Language: eng
ISBN-13: 9780230103214
Subjects: Friends and associates; Psychology; LITERARY CRITICISM / General; Philosophy; Criticism and interpretation; Romanticism; Religion; Supernatural in literature; LITERARY CRITICISM / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh; LITERARY CRITICISM / Poetry
Description: "Fascinated by his own imagination, Coleridge secretly wrote that its characteristic blend of power and desire made him a "Daemon": a being superstitiously feared as "a something transnatural." Coleridge and the Daemonic Imagination examines this simultaneous experience of exaltation and transgression as a formative principle in Coleridge's poetry and the fabric of his philosophy. In a reading that spans the breadth of Coleridge's achievement, through politics, religion and his relationship with Wordsworth, this book builds to a new interpretation of the poems where Coleridge's daemonic imagination produces its myths: "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," "Kubla Khan" and "Christabel." Gregory Leadbetter reveals a Coleridge at once more familiar and more strange, in a study that unfolds into an essay on poetry, spirituality, and the drama of human becoming"--

"Through politics, religion and his relationship with Wordsworth, the book builds to a new interpretation of the poems where Coleridge's daemonic imagination produces its myths: 'The Ancient Mariner', 'Kubla Khan' and 'Christabel'. Re-reading the origins of Romanticism, Leadbetter reveals a Coleridge at once more familiar and more strange"--
Notes: Includes bibliographical references.
Table of contents: title: Machine generated contents note:; title: The Willing Daemon: Coleridge and the Transnatural; title: "Pagan Philosophy" and the "Pride of Speculation" : Spiritual Politics and the Metaphysical Imagination, 1795-1797; title: "Not a Man, But a Monster" : Organicism, Becoming and the Daemonic Imago; title: Transnatural Language: The "Library-Cormorant" in the "Vernal Wood"; title: "The Dark Green Adder's Tongue": Osorio and the "Poetry of Nature"; title: "A Distinct Current of My Own": Poetry and the Uses of the Supernatural; title: "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"; title: "Kubla Khan"; title: "Christabel".